Four Centuries, One Compositional Voice

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The pianist Peter Serkin performed as part of the People's Symphony Concert series at the Washington Irving High School.CreditChristopher Gregory for The New York Times

By David Allen

Nov. 4, 2014

If you’re looking for a concert experience totally without artifice, the Peoples’ Symphony Concerts at the Washington Irving High School auditorium in Manhattan fit the bill. It’s not just the ticket price ($14) of these concerts, now in their centenary season in this airy, acoustically bright hall, that endears. The program tells you all you need to know and little more. Generic cough drops are offered in a little bowl by the door, but few are taken. On a recent night, coats were strewed just to the left of the stage, next to a floor fan pasted with a scrawled note reading “broken.”

The best thing? The audience really listened. Concentration was vital to unpack a typically cerebral recital from the pianist Peter Serkin, who has given concerts at the Peoples’ Symphony for 45 years. This one ranged from the early 16th century to the early 20th, from Renaissance polyphony to Viennese atonality. Who else but Mr. Serkin would think that a first half containing Josquin and Sweelinck, Bull and Nielsen — let alone a second of Dowland and Byrd, Mozart and Schoenberg — could possibly work?

And yet it did. It should be impossible to hear the past while forgetting the present. Rarely have I heard a recital quite so thoughtfully put together, so successful in its time travels, even if the playing at times didn’t have the accuracy or confidence to match.

Harmony was the key, rather than history. Mr. Serkin drew merely fleeting contrapuntal insight from Sweelinck’s “Capriccio” and found only timid fragility in Bull’s remarkable experiment in constant modulation, “Ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la.” Dowland’s “Pavana Lachrymae” (as arranged by Byrd) had a poise made all the more powerful for its grief’s dignity, and Josquin’s “Ave Christe” (transcribed by Charles Wuorinen) worked, despite detached playing.

But it was the relentless, almost aimless chromaticism of them all that was most important. They looked forward less to Nielsen’s “Theme With Variations” (1917) — an impulsive work that Mr. Serkin rendered as a distorted nocturne, half-revealed in ghostly frosts — than to the psychodrama of Mozart’s K. 511 Rondo in A minor (1787). That was gracefully if fussily played, certainly, and in Mr. Serkin’s hands, four centuries of harmony seemed to speak in one compositional voice.

Schoenberg, then, by way of the Suite (Op. 25), his tone-row refraction of Bach’s suites, pushed everything a step further. In Mr. Serkin’s smoothly romanticized playing, its Praeludium seemed to hide a hazy reworking of Mozart’s theme, and the Gavotte and Gigue had all the character that Byrd’s “La Volta” and Bull’s “A Gigge” had lacked. Even the encores made sense, as supplements to Schoenberg’s individual movements: a Mozart Gigue (K. 574), and a Brahms Intermezzo (Op. 119, No. 3).